Don't Wake Daddy: Martin Kippenberger and the Schreber Case

Abstract

In the later years of his work, Martin Kippenberger made a number of paintings, multiples, and works on paper that referred to both Daniel Paul Schreber—a German judge whose Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) became a subject of considerable commentary by psychoanalysts and critical theorists throughout the twentieth century—and his father, physician Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber. Nathan Stobaugh offers an analysis of these works from the 1990s and argues that Kippenberger's engagement with this case, when placed in the context of his larger body of work, demonstrates the necessity of scrutinizing the Schreber father and son together. While this scrutiny might cast Kippenberger's observers themselves as paranoiacs, such a position might be necessary to apprehend a cultural predicament in which authoritarian power seems equally likely to congeal in the form of a patriarchal master as it is to spread throughout a world in which children of all ages are forced, through the management of their desire, into particular molds.